The Shanghai World Financial Center officially topped out this morning at 492 meters in height, becoming the tallest building on the Chinese mainland.

Twenty guests screwed 20 golden bolts on to two steel beams, which were installed on the 101st floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center to mark the completion.

The wedge-shaped tower, with a rectangular hole at the very top in Shanghai's Lujiazui financial district, covers a floor area of 381,600 square meters and will eventually house 70 floors of office space meant to accommodate 12,000 people, with a hotel, restaurants and an observatory at the top.

The building's management said the rent for the office space is expected to reach 20 yuan (US$2.66) per square meter a day.

Shanghai's Jinmao Tower, a silver spire next door to the World Financial Center was the mainland's tallest building until recently at a height of 421 meters.

For six years after groundbreaking at the site in the mid-1990s, the financial center was little more than a hole in the ground: The Asian financial crisis had virtually obliterated demand for new office space in Shanghai.

After the project was revived in 2003, the builders had to alter a key design feature - a circular cutout near the top - after complaints that it resembled the rising sun on Japan's flag, a symbol reviled by many Chinese because of Japan's brutal occupation of the country in World War II.

And earlier this year, the tower's builder, the Mori Building Co of Tokyo, was criticized by Shanghai authorities for altering the project's name to "Shanghai Hills" to link it to its other marquee projects, the famed Roppongi Hills and Omotesando Hills complexes.

The company said the formal registered name of the project remained the Shanghai World Financial Center and "Shanghai Hills" was merely a branding strategy.

(Shanghai Daily September 14, 2007)